For all its speed and centrifugal force, all its peril and push-the-envelope ingenuity, stock-car racing for decades subsisted on its array of characters. Guys named Fonty and Fireball, the Intimidator and the King, Foyt and France.
They were an ensemble of ruffians and renegades, booze runners and barrier crashers, united by a critical common denominator.
All were mavericks.
Now, their audacity and achievements have been recounted in a sleek, photo-filled coffee-table book authored by a pair of USF graduates. “NASCAR Mavericks: The Rebels and Racers Who Revolutionized Stock Car Racing,” was released Tuesday. Published by Motorbooks (an imprint of the Quarto Publishing Group), it’s available at various online sites including Amazon and store.nascar.com.
H.A. “Herb” Branham and Holly Cain, both former Tampa Tribune motorsports writers, spent 10 months on the project, interviewing roughly 100 sources.
“What does it mean to be a maverick?” three-time NASCAR champ Tony Stewart asks rhetorically in his foreword. “Speaking from personal experience, it’s doing what you think is right, even when others say you’re wrong. And it’s being told you can’t, so you go even harder just to prove them wrong.”
What ensues over the next 192 pages is an illustrated digest of sorts; character sketches in simple, unapologetic prose of those who embodied the maverick approach.
“We talked to just about anybody that was relevant to the stories that were still alive, including obviously the people themselves,” Branham said.
The mavericks include visionaries who helped propel the sport from red-clay tracks to major speedways (i.e. Bill France Sr.), crew chiefs who bent the rules to nearly their breaking point (i.e. Smokey Yunick), and drivers who had developed their automotive chops by running from the law in the South’s nether regions (i.e. Curtis Turner).
The group also features those who sped full-throttle into what was once deemed a Southern-male sport. Among them: Wendell Scott, the first Black racer to win a NASCAR Cup Series race; and Sara Christian, the first female driver in the Strictly Stock Division (forerunner to the NASCAR Cup Series).
Of course, the stars of NASCAR’s heyday — such as Dale Earnhardt, Darrell Waltrip and Richard Petty — get their due, as do modern-day mavericks such as Stewart, Kurt and Kyle Busch, and Hall of Fame crew chief Chad Knaus.
Even maverick-style developments (a tobacco company becoming a corporate sponsor, the network TV takeover, the creation of a street race in Chicago) are chronicled.
“It was a little bit of Wild West-style,” said Branham, who worked in NASCAR’s communications department nearly two decades.
“It’s really not a corporate book at all. NASCAR I think is consciously just trying to ungloss what we did during my time there, where we just put lacquers over all of the history, at times which was deemed maybe not the type of stuff that mainstream America would like. And I think NASCAR now is trying to put it in reverse a little bit, and they’re really trying to recapture that great history.”
Complementing that history are hundreds of photos — some iconic — that help bring the characters and cars to life. Noticeably absent is Michael Jordan’s ongoing antitrust lawsuit against NASCAR — a maverick move in itself — but Branham said the book had been completed long before that litigation arose.
“We would’ve dealt with it,” he said. “We would’ve mentioned it, because there’s really not a whole lot of punches pulled in this book, which kind of makes it a little bit different.”
Kind of a hardcover maverick.
Contact Joey Knight at jknight@tampabay.com. Follow @TBTimes_Bulls
